Word: chips
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Frankly, if you wanted an IBM-compatible computer, you had to buy an Intel chip, period. And without real competitors in the CPU market, chip prices (and thus computer prices) never drifted down...
What's more, Cyrix's new MediaGX chips began to integrate most of the motherboard components and the CPPU on a single chip. System integrators such as Compaq have responded by designing systems around these chips that require much less engineering and electronic assembly, slashing prices to levels unheard-of a year...
Some 50,000 of the cash cards, also known as "smart cards," are being mailed to consumers this week by Chase Manhattan and Citibank. They look like conventional credit, debit or ATM cards, but there is a vital difference: a tiny chip that can electronically store money. A consumer first takes the card to an ATM and downloads, say, $100 onto the chip. When the card is inserted into a terminal, the chip deducts the price of a newspaper or chewing gum from the total stored on the card and adds it to the virtual cash stored in the terminal...
...critical business question: Will consumers be willing to pay the regular downloading fees--45 [cents] to $1--for the convenience of cash on a chip? Merchants pay nothing, unlike with credit cards, where they fork over 2% to 6% of the transaction as a handling fee. In fact, a cashless society may be more beneficial to banks and merchants. Handling cash is time consuming, prone to error and poses security risks...
They just got two. First, Intel, the world's largest semiconductor firm, announced that its engineers had discovered a Houdini-like trick for stuffing twice the quantity of digital information in the same physical space on a chip. Then last week IBM unveiled what may be an even more significant advance: its researchers had found a way to replace the aluminum conductors in their microprocessors with copper, which is cheaper and faster. Says IBM vice president John Kelly, who has been experimenting with copper chips since the 1980s: "This...